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LIVE review: Bloodstock 2016 - Chordblossom

First of the Northern Irish acts was this year’s Metal 2 the Masses winners The Crawling(you can read about their victory here), whose doomy death metal proved to fit the style of Bloodstock perfectly.

Their commanding half hour set on the Friday drew a large crowd into the New Blood stage tent almost immediately, and those lucky enough to witness them were mightily impressed by their darkly pulsating songs.

Vocalist/guitarist Andy Clarke is a true showman, with a snarling voice that drips with venom and a penetrating glare that pins the crowd into place. They play an engrossing mix of both slow and fast music which keeps the crowd hooked, and by the time they arrive at final track ‘The Right to Crawl’ it’s clear that they’ve smashed their set right out of Catton Park. Magnificent.

ANATOMY OF LOSS is the debut album from the semi-sober Irish death metal band THE CRAWLING. A promising band with an even more promising album.

After the release of their three track EP IN LIGHT OF DARK DAYS, I have been looking forward to hearing this record. In terms of style and sound, this album is very much more of the same. There is a vast selection of death metal riffing, each one being as catchy as the other thanks to having more emphasis on the rhythm rather then following the idiotic trend of how fast and extreme they could play.

When the group aren’t thrashing out on their instruments, they are playing slow heavy chords that is best described as doom metal. These songs start off slow (a little too slow for my personal taste) and had they been a little longer, they would have been a little tedious. But THE CRAWLING seem to have enough common sense to realise that each song requires a good hook and just when things slow down, they burst into life with some mean riff. Both styl…

There’s some great titles on this album and one is ‘An Immaculate Deception’ that possesses some tough and twisting rhythms with a deep dark grunting vocal that you can feel in your gut as it rips your intestines out! Moving on to the next track ‘Poison Orange’ I can almost hear the band laughing when they thought up this track title, but also can feel the harshness brooding as it plays out and leaks its venomous liquid through its vicious assault, and this is without being played fast.

‘Acid on my Skin’ speaks volumes from its title and will have you believe that it is toxic and caustic and of course you would be right to believe as its abrasive mark is made with a very potent vocal and large slices of darkened rhythms.

‘All Our Failings’ is a very imposing track that holds a lot of insatiable bait. It begins fast and then slows down to reveal that it can’t make up its mind if it wants to move faster or slower so you just have to go along with the flow, however, the track contains real…